Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't Tread on Anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. Today, I'm joined by Amy Lepore.
She holds a PhD in public policy from the University of Delaware.
Dr. Lepore, thank you so much for your time.
It's good to see you, Keith. Thank you for having me on.
Absolutely. What is FEMA and what is its
alleged purpose? Yes, so, so FEMA has only
existed since the late 70s. FEMA was founded in 79 under a
Carter administration. And prior to FEMA, disasters had
been handled, the disaster resources at the federal level
had been handled by many organizations.
And so there was not a centralized effort until the
Carter administration. So with the centralization of
those efforts, things came under FEMA, not just natural disaster
relief the way we think about hurricanes and flooding, but
also civil defense was a bit of a holdover from roughly the 50s.
And so the civil defense, which ultimately down the road would
become kind of a focus on man made hazards and then on on
terrorism. So that also became ushered
under the the FEMA umbrella in the late 70s and as you know has
changed drastically since then. As far as its alleged purpose or
stated intentions for existing, always seems like no matter what
they can find an emergency to get us on.
Is it a virus? Is the climate changing?
Is Vladimir Putin a bad guy? It's always an emergency which
constantly results in the state getting more power and more
money. What is its alleged purpose and
do they ever define emergency so I can have a reference point?
Yeah, we'll, we'll you know, the, the, the term emergency and
and even the declaration itself of emergency which brings to
bear resources has has seen exponential increase in how we
think about it. That term has expanded.
It's certainly never contracted and we can expect that it never
will. But you know, so FEMA in
delivering those, you know, it's, it's charter really it's,
it's so charter is to coordinate resources at the federal level.
And ideally in disaster, those resources should not be tapped
into until local and state resources like the availability
of to evacuate people to shelter, to provide mass care,
to make sure people have medical supplies as needed.
Those those types of resources and certainly even homeowner
assistance aren't intended to, to be brought to bear until
local and state organizations, their Emergency Management
agencies say we're topped out. We don't have the people, we
don't have the supplies and we no longer have the funds.
And we have already contributed XYZ to this effort.
So now we are ready for FEMA to come in and to bring, you know,
FEMA brings in not only FEMA, but you can see in the local
response, there's also National Guard, we saw Customs and Border
Patrol resources. We know there are ATF agents on
the ground. So with with the declaration of
this size comes a lot of federal resources and FEMA's is, you
know, intended really to provide that centralized hub for
coordination within the federal organizations and then also top
down from the federal to the state and local organizations as
well. But you brought up something
really important. So I'm going to keep going with
this because you talked a little bit about the expanding notion
of disaster and the expanding notion of deck the declaration
process. One of the things that FEMA
does, we know they have responsible for the disaster
Relief Fund of those funds that are given to state and local
organizations. And then also, I think that
encompasses the funds given over to homeowners after damage
assessment for things like initial personal goods, but then
also repairs to their home and also mitigative measures.
So the, you know, opportunity to elevate if you're in a flood
area. FEMA does pay for hazard
mitigation efforts for local homeowners and local
jurisdictions. And over the last 30 years,
there's been almost $350 billion spent across 1700 declarations
for for disaster. And about 44% of that, I don't
think this is going to surprise you, but about 44% of that has
been spent on hurricane response.
And a huge chunk of that, as you can imagine on storms like
Katrina, really everything else kind of pales in comparison to
to the extent of damage and need for recovery when when you look
at Katrina until today, I think what we see happening in
Appalachia. But of those $350 billion in the
last 30 years, would you believe that 20% was spent on COVID?
Not even something that we think about.
So, So take away the whole debate about the insane response
to this cold. Take that away completely.
Just just thinking about what federal resources are required
to respond to emergency, 30 years of disaster relief funds,
20% of that spent on COVID. It's absolute insanity.
But it makes great sense when you think about the change in
FEMA. And we didn't really talk about
that yet. So after 911, FEMA was merged up
under the Department of Homeland Security and at this time
national security and emergency response kind of became
synonymous. So FEMA merged up under DHS
really with this, this, this morphing, this morphing
response, moving from natural hazards, maybe thinking a little
bit about civil defense, but morphing really from natural
hazards to thinking about man made hazards.
And not just not just civil defense from like a a nuclear
incident standpoint, but also moving to kind of man made
terrorism, other acts that could happen in the continental US.
And so we, we really have kind of this expanding notion and
then enter COVID, which is really, you know, in, in terms
of large scale incidents in the US that have taken that have
given the state the opportunity really to take advantage of what
they built with FEMA and DHS after 911.
I would say that COVID was an excellent test case for how far
they could get locals to go. You know, what could they get
local officials to do to their neighbors?
And it for me, you know, my research is old at this, My
research is almost a decade old at this point.
But you know, I got to watch Kovid and got to see some of
that unravel. And, and the concerns in my
research are really, what are local folks going to do with all
this money? Is it going to change how they
think about local response and how they how they care for their
neighbors and how they plan with their communities?
And overwhelmingly the answer is yes.
And we only have to look at COVID and vaccinating our
neighbors and telling them they can't go to the park.
And and sitting in an emergency operation center plotting and
planning really how to manage your fellow citizens.
Which is pretty gross if you ask me.
The Libertarian Institute published a book, Diary of a
Psychosis by Tom Wood. So on top of the claim that,
well, we get to institute a domestic imperialist regime and
tell people when they can go outside and who they can do
commerce with and when and for what reason, we'll tell you if
you're a what was the sickening term that they used, if you're a
necessary firm, or if you are, what was the Orwellian term?
It was something about whether your job is really important.
Oh, like non essential versus essential?
Essential firms. Essential firms.
So yeah, first they said there was that.
And then it turns out after years of research, Tom Woods
gathered that there was no correlation between COVID deaths
and states that had severe mask mandates for long term, severe
lockdowns for long terms. He compares California and
Florida, and he also compares countries, mentioning Sweden.
He mentions Japan along with a very similar populations that
had very different responses. There was no significant effect.
And Fauci actually knew this because in March of 2020, he was
on 60 Minutes and he said people should not be wearing masks.
There's no reason. Yes, your doctor wears a mask
during surgery, but that's never been well, I'm going to wear
this now to protect you from any respiratory viruses I might
have. So it was a complete scam.
It wasn't only immoral, it was completely ineffective.
Anything else we could learn from the COVID era when it comes
to how we can see FEMA as a legitimate or illegitimate
organization when it comes to future responses?
Yeah, my, my, my analysis of FEMA has really been almost,
almost solely focused on its intergovernmental relationship
with local governments. So looking at how the, the, how
the, the trade in grants rights of federal government gives
local jurisdictions so much money and FEMA and DHS are a
major purveyor of that. And so looking at how that, that
grant exchange process so that we pay off the local
governments, they do whatever we want.
And I think again, COVID was a huge test of that.
Will local governments, will they, will they act in the the
opposite interest to their neighbors?
And, and overwhelmingly the answer was yes.
Will public safety agencies lock down parks and beaches and tell
families they can't play at baseball outside and make their
neighbors wear masks and make them, you know, and, and, and
play this role where not just emergency services, although
they played a large hand in it, but certainly local public
health playing a role in incentivizing the citizenry in
their local jurisdictions, their neighbors, their friends, their
baseball coaches, the teachers at their schools, incentivizing
them to take an experimental vaccine, right.
Whatever to, to, to, you know, and, and I think that the grant
exchange process, while it's not sexy to talk about, like money
is not like, like, you know, I get that the grant process is
not exciting to talk about, but I assure you that it has driven
this entire thing, the lack of autonomy that local governments
have now because of the amounts of their operational budgets.
And this is especially the case for public safety, even though
generally, even though my, my research is almost solely
focused on Emergency Management, but that that kind of
relationship, that that perversion where the federal
government is paying for local operations.
What, what vested interest does a federal government have in
paying for an emergency manager in a local jurisdiction?
It seems, I know like sometimes it seems so innocuous.
Well, they just want local governments to be prepared.
Well, that is incredibly foolish.
And all we have to do is to take a look at the local government's
response to that relationship. And we can talk a little if, if
now's a good time, we can talk a little bit about kind of those,
those research findings. But we have only to look at a
couple of things. The first is the Uniform Code,
the, the code, sorry, the Code of Federal Regulations, which
states that any equipment that is purchased with those funds
can be reabsorbed by the federal government at any time.
So really all we're doing is we are buying the federal
government extra Bearcats, extra mass casualty ambulances, extra
mobile command units they can position.
All those things are assigned to local government.
Local government emergency services essentially become
federal outpost staffed with people paid for by the federal
government and equipped from their, you know, their from
their hazmat units to their mobile command units to their
Bearcats equipped nearly in some cases nearly completely with
Homeland Security and FEMA dollars, right.
And that's separate from the disaster Relief Fund.
But the point is the same. There is no autonomy anymore.
And the lines are so completely blurred between what is local
and and really the state. The state has a weird role here,
right? The state, the state agencies
generally serve as a pass through for these grants, but
there is nearly a direct funding between the federal and the
local government. And, and to think it's not just
the equipment piece, it is also the things that we heard
emergency managers say in a nationwide study.
In their own words, they told us that overwhelmingly they
wouldn't even exist. Their local governments would
not fund their their positions if it weren't for federal grant
dollars. This calls into question two
things. The first is, well, if you're
not a priority for your local government, what the heck are
you doing, guy? But also what is the federal
government's intention with locally positioning a person
whose job is to plan for man made and natural disasters and
continue to equip that person and their operation and maybe
additional people, you know, large jurisdictions like a
Baltimore City, it's going to have many people funded by FEMA
and Homeland Security. So what is their intention?
And we, you know, in in asking local emergency managers across
the country about that? I think the question was, you
know, does your relationship with federal grants, does it
inhibit your ability to properly respond to local needs?
In other words, does your intake of these federal funds, does it
does it lessen your ability to respond locally with proper
local knowledge? Like, are you taking care of
what the federal government wants versus what is
appropriate? Are you versus like properly
planning for sheltering and evacuation and, and mass care?
And overwhelmingly, Keith, the answer, the answer was
absolutely yes. We are beholden to federal
standards. We are beholden to this federal
paperwork. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't
for them. So we're kind of going to do
what they say. And yeah, it's, it's taking away
our our local focus. They love just taking away the
focus constantly. They're like, we care about the
plight of the middle class and especially black Americans.
And I'm like, all right, 60% of black Americans want school
choice. And they're like, that's not
what we're talking about. At all.
That's not If you could stop being a Putin puppet, I would
appreciate it because that's not what the That's not what we're
going for. Your PhD thesis is titled The
effects of Federal Financial Assistance Attitudes and Actions
of Local Emergency Managers. So what is the agreement is the
agreement that we're going to give states that meet these
requirements X amount of dollars and that's basically how they
control it. He who pays the piper calls the
tune. They then are able to set the
standards by controlling the flow of monetary resources.
What? What do we need to know about
how they're funded more generally?
Yeah, so there are. So I'm going to try to speak
generally because as you can imagine, there are so many grant
programs, but I'll talk a little bit about two that come to mind
that end up funding Emergency Management staff at the local
level, but that are passed through from the the state
government. So the Emergency Management
performance grant, which is heavily, I think heavily
involved in funding staff positions.
And then the state Homeland Security grant program, which
can also fund staff positions, but has been largely responsible
for funding all of those huge equipment purchases that came in
the the years after 911. So those, those two grants come
with requirements metrics and the requirements are kind of the
thing we talked about already, which is, you know, we're going
to buy you some equipment, but like we could take it anytime it
can be repurposed for other federal programs.
So essentially you're buying it with the understanding that you
can use it until we need it. And the types of things we
purchased with those funds are concerning in terms of not
wanting to hand over more of that kind of power and and
equipment to the federal government.
And then there's also a simple guideline, which which sounds
like it wouldn't be a big deal, but it ends up being incredibly
time consuming. Things like making sure that all
responders in a jurisdiction are trained, kind of centralized and
trained in something called the National Incident Management
System. And that are, are using kind of
an unseen response called the incident command system, which
is intended to be just a mechanism of response, a way to
organize on scene to make sure you know, kind of in a, in an
innocent fashion, right? Like that all organizations are
working together, that your subject matter experts on scene
have appropriate kind of insight and oversight of, of local
response. But this, it, it seems
innocuous, but this, this NIMS and ICS training end up being a,
a primary feature of what an emergency manager does.
We spent years making people sit through all of these trainings.
I mean, every cop, every firefighter, every dispatcher,
every hazmat tech, right through multiple trainings so that you
could be in receipt of these grant funds.
So in the years after 911, probably, I would say probably
for 10 years after that, if not, if not 12, and just a ridiculous
amount of time spent on sitting in a classroom training people.
And so a reasonable question to ask in exchange for federal
grant funds, you have to meet these training requirements.
They are time consuming, but maybe there's a return on
investment, right? Maybe this training is
phenomenal and it's exactly what first responders need to be able
to properly respond. And then just scale that
response up if it's not just a singular emergency, but becomes
a disaster with several States and many jurisdictions
responding. And it would be reasonable if we
got really good at that to think, OK, so that was worth our
time. So I'm going to share just a
couple of things with you that I think demonstrate that that the
incident command system and the mechanism that of of roll out
and the the time it has taken, it's unlikely that it has been
worth it. And those are two examples that
that you'll be familiar with. So, you know, the, the issues in
Uvalde with the school shooting can almost absolutely be pointed
to a lack of on you can point to a lack of understanding of how
how an incident is supposed to to to unravel that looks like an
active shooter. And we have the chief arriving,
refusing to take command of the of the incident and saying in
his own word in saying he's, I did not issue any orders.
So here we have the state of Texas and all the counties in
Texas rolling out this expensive, elaborate kind of
requirement for training. And in the one time it was
needed in Uvalde, it did not work.
And he was the one guy who sat through it in Uvalde.
It's absolutely ridiculous. We have another issue where we
are not only doing that training, but we are building
huge elaborate emergency operation centers and fusion
centers with, you know, Department of Homeland Security
and FEMA funding. And in the Marjory Stoneman
Douglas, the the school shooting in Florida, those resources were
not used. And the report attributes much
of the inability for responders to properly communicate during
that incident and much of the outcome of that incident to a
lack of coordination. The sole use of those facilities
and of the training was so that this would not happen, so that
there will be seamless communication and coordination.
And that's not happening. So in terms of what does the
local relationship with the federal government look like as
a response to those grants, It looks like a lot of paperwork
and a lot of training that has not made a lot of difference.
So your general criticism is twofold. 1, the feds don't
necessarily have the knowledge of what people in a certain
locality need, and two, they don't have the incentive to
provide those goods effectively. Is there anything I'm missing in
your overall thesis? No, absolutely not.
And in fact, I think the overall the, the, the thesis would be
the incentive provided to local governments of, of finance and
the ability to kind of increase bureaucracies at the local level
is not correlated at all with an increase in, in local emergency
preparedness. So let's use the A Vol Day
example because that one was extra egregious.
I don't have the numbers in front of me.
I want to say 300 plus officers were dispatched and did not go
into the school and one woman was arrested for trying to go
into the school where she was just terrified and wanted to
save. Her.
Child. Yes.
OK. I I wanted to make sure I wasn't
misremembering that. Thank you.
What happened after? See, I would think like they
completely lost their funding and the top ten people at FEMA
were fired and everyone had to do more training and they had to
give taxpayers the refund. What ended up happening?
Yeah. Let me just want to quickly
separate the issue. So the, the funding that we're
talking about for training is absolutely paid.
It it's is funded by the Department of Homeland Security
and centralized through the Emergency Management office.
The staffers are largely paid with Homeland Security and FEMA
dollars. So I'm telling the story I'm
telling involves more than one type of federal grant.
So I'm I'm going to try to, to stay on on task here.
I don't want to to to misinform. So the issue in Uvalde, I'm I'm
not sure what happened afterwards.
I read the report. The report didn't include any
personnel information at the time.
I'm given to understand that chief is no Chief Arredondo is
no longer there and and and others have pointed to his his
on scene response and his refusal to take command, his
admission that he did not issue any orders despite being the
senior person on site when that that incident, when that
incident occurred, people certainly pointed to that and I
assume it's the reason he was fired.
And that is one among many errors that occurred on that
day. But but yeah, so, so I would
there is, there is, yeah, your, your I think your question is
there ever a refund on, on poor service?
And the answer is absolutely not.
And in fact, I bet you that that more federal dollars rolled into
that that location right into that jurisdiction to to right
the wrongs. And there's never an assessment
of return on investment, nearly never right for for this
billions of dollars invested. The reason I ask is I so often
hear from government advocates that, well, what if there's a
company and they do a really bad thing?
Well, maybe there's prosecution, but at the end of the day, you
can stop funding companies in the voluntary sector, but that's
not what you get with government.
So I actually, I was not being facetious.
I did not know what happened in that of all the case.
Have you come across any evidence that laws against price
gouging lower the cost of products without creating
shortages or significant decreases in the the quality of
goods and services people in disaster zones have access to?
Yeah, no, no. And actually I was taking a look
at at the the concerns coming out of North Carolina and
Tennessee and you know, they're always evident after disaster.
There's always concern. And you always hear your AGS and
your state officials decrying price gouging and saying that
the type of, you know, saying they they can't wait to can
level punishment on on these companies.
And what is most interesting about price gouging and the way
that people think about it is that they're always referring
until the big, big and greedy corporations.
But the truth is a lot of a lot of what's coming out of North
Carolina and Tennessee are small companies who, because of, you
know, the, the supply that is accessible, must elevate prices.
And this, you know, this encourages people, right?
People who would be purchasing immediately before or after a
disaster to, to, you know, to, to make good decisions with the
supply on hand and to not over purchase.
You know, the, the price gouging while while decried by our, our
politicians, really is a mechanism by which our, our
supply is mediated after disaster.
Right now there are over 300 complaints that are being
investigated in North Carolina. I don't know about the numbers
in Tennessee, but I think generally, you know, it is
things like hotel costs, grocery costs and fuel get the bulk of
the attention in terms of price gouging.
I think sometimes things like generators and there have been
plenty of stories about that after disaster, but these are
this is the nature of complaint. It's not just big greedy
corporations. People are wrong when they say
that. It's often mom and pop shops
trying to do the best they can to keep the supply on hand for
for folks who really need it. Yeah, I've always been told I
need to vilify people who are producing goods and services and
offering them to me voluntarily. But parasites who offer me
nothing? Well, those are just my comrades
and I got to support them relentlessly.
You'd think I'd have a little more appreciation for the people
trying to get us out of this mess on page 29, but you say
classic economic theory dictates that decision making for the
emergency manager must take into account that quote.
According to Applied Economic, citizens will demand an
increasing number of publicly provided services in increasing
amounts, while wanting to spend less of their personal income
for these goods and services. So we're just taking the common
sense economics people have known for centuries.
When you raise the cost of something, people will consume
it less and it will increase the incentive for other producers to
come to this specific area and increase the supply of goods and
services. And the federal government keeps
protecting us from a higher supply of goods and more options
when it comes to quality. Anything else on the incentives
created by governments during disasters or what we need to
know about this before we move on?
Yeah, I would say, I would say there is there is something else
that is that is an inappropriate signal I think that the federal
government is sending before disaster.
So in the preparedness phase, I feel like FEMA has for for
decades now signal to the American public we're going to
be there when there is a disaster.
And I think that that reduce it. You know, I mean, just like in
its simplest form, and we can talk about this in a, in a more
complex sense, but in its simplest form, that tells like
my monkey brain, I don't have to worry so much in my home, right?
I live, if I live on the water, I have subsidized flood
insurance, so that's cool. And also, if my house floods,
FEMA's going to come in and they're going to, you know,
they're, you know, as long as the the incident is large
enough, they're going to come in and they're probably going to
help with remediation. And if I'm lucky, I'm going to
get a mitigation grant and they're going to elevate my
home. And if I'm in a hurricane prone
area, they're going to put hurricane shutters on my house.
And I feel like yes, the the blame is partially on homeowners
who do not take accountability. But I think that FEMA has
signaled in, in just after Katrina and certainly after 911,
we started using the, I don't know if you have heard this, but
FEMA started using this language.
And oh, I heard it from Deanna Criswell, the current director
of FEMA just a couple of days ago.
They called themselves the federal family.
And they say things like you're a federal family is, is prepared
to respond into Tennessee. Your federal family is leaning
forward and providing coordination on on the ground.
I mean, they're signaling to the American people that you can be
less prepared, that FEMA will have resources not just for
homeowners and but also businesses.
You know, through the through FEMA, the Small Business
Administration grants for local businesses are provided.
So there really has been a signaling by the federal
government that we can be less prepared in our homes because of
the resources that FEMA brings to bear after a disaster.
And it's simply not true. There are countless stories.
I have my own kind of horror stories of working storms and
being the person responsible for telling homeowners or
businesses, you know, this, this disaster didn't meet the
threshold or home is 10% less damage than your neighbors.
There are no funds. And they would say, but they're
always FEMA funds after a disaster.
And this is the result of decades of of inappropriate
messaging signaling to homeowners that they have a lack
of that, that there is not an incentive to be more prepared.
And as far as the allocation of responders, are they all in
America? I heard you say something to the
extent of like the bunch of them went to Kuwait the day before
Milton or something. I'm sorry, I don't have that
quote in front of me. I've written that down.
Talk to me about the incentive they have to properly allocate,
you know, service providers in the case of an emergency.
Yeah, this is important and and you'll, you know, you'll be able
to, to really weigh on, on this as well.
So if you were to ask me some, what are the, the most
appropriate initial steps to take to make, to make fairly
quick improvement in our system of response.
I would tell you that passing the Defend the Guard Act is one
of the issues we're already working.
So it makes it slightly more feasible because it is an active
piece of legislation in over 30 legislatures and it has the, and
it brings with it the opportunity to do 2 really
important things. The first related to our
conversation is provide well trained, well equipped people
who are positioned locally who can respond and frankly, whose
job it is to respond to local disaster.
The the folks who heard me talking about who were going to
Kuwait was the Tennessee National Guard the day before
Hurricane Helene hit. It's unacceptable.
Those people should be home. They should be responding in
their communities. They do not belong in Kuwait of
all places. And the second thing the Defend
the Guard bill does is strike a blow at the military industrial
complex, right? So, so we like it for a couple
of reasons. But if you were to just say
like, hey, what's on the books right now?
What what looks like it is not a full solution, but something
that could make quick improvement.
Keeping our National Guard at home, relying on those assets,
relying on state assets and not thinking so much about what the
federal government can manifest in disasters is probably a not a
quick win, but for whatever state passes at first, certainly
a an opportunity for improvement.
Would any of the areas you're referring to, Tennessee or North
Carolina, would they be categorized as a rural areas?
I yeah, I think the my understanding is even Asheville
in North Carolina, which is would be one of the more well
populated areas near what kind of contiguous to to where the
damage is that did not see the extent of damage that we are
seeing in the pictures, right. So that is in the mountains.
This is Appalachia. These are absolutely rural
areas. They're areas that don't have
the resources of suburban and, and urban areas already, right?
Like there's not a grocery store every two blocks.
There's not fuel everywhere. There are people living who
don't, you know, there's not like not, not all the big box
neighborhoods, right? There's people who live in rural
areas. They are prone to power outages
just based on kind of their, their proximity to the woods,
right? Just and, and the lack of
opportunity once kind of trapped in their home or trapped in
their small area, the inability to get out and, and to move
about and to get quickly to a shelter.
Yeah, I think the the primary area that has been hit is
largely rural. FEMA produced this document
titled Achieving Equitable Recovery, a post disaster guide
for local officials and leaders saying why equity matters in
post disaster recovery. The term equity means the
consistent and systematic, fair just an impartial treatment of
all individuals, including individuals who belong to under
underserved communities that have been denied such treatment,
such as Black, Latino and Indigenous and Native American
persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other
persons of color, members of religious minorities, lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender and queer LGBTQ plus persons,
persons with disabilities, persons who live in rural areas,
and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty
or inequality. So this is how FEMA responds to
who they they say is a very high priority demographic, persons
who live in rural areas. And this is the result that we
get absolute catastrophe and sending them to Kuwait before
sending them to the taxpayers they claim to be serving and
claim to be the employees of. So it is just pathetic to see
how the merit is completely thrown out the window.
They don't brag about how effective of a job they do.
They brag much more about diversity, equity and inclusion.
So FEMA's a disaster. Anything on this 'cause we have
two more things I want. To get to Yeah, absolutely,
Keith. So just briefly it it's it's far
worse than that. FEMA.
It's it's clear, especially under this current director who
made known very early in her career that she was, you know,
going to take on their pet liberal causes.
She uses the language of the left and and that's not, there's
not really room for that when we're talking about preparing
for disaster, who effects that affect everybody.
So taking on their pet, pet pet issues like climate change, if
you look further into the FEMA documentation, you look what
they're really what their focus is right now.
Their focus is on climate change.
Their focus is on equity initiatives.
And Keith, you're never going to believe what I found not long
ago. So I was looking around this
morning kind of kind of digging into actually what you just
showed something a little bit more about the, the equity
initiatives, because I'll talk here in a minute about what they
have done at the local level. And that started a couple of
decades ago to, to really round out this initiative.
There's a, a organization that works with FEMA that is
concerned about whether or not you can access your abortion
during disaster. You know, they passing out free
condoms, making sure you can get to your abortion appointment,
you know, if there is a disaster in your area.
I mean, these, these are these, you know, clearly it's not just
using the language of the left. These pet liberal causes are,
are really prime drivers at FEMA and certainly at DHS.
And I'm sure if we were to dig in at any federal organization,
it's exactly what we would say. But this, this equity initiative
is not just at the federal level over I would say the just it,
it, it is probably immediately following 911 when they start
when jurisdiction started hiring more emergency managers to to, I
don't know monitor for Al Qaeda or something here in the US,
right. So they started undertaking
things like the federal kind of a higher higher education
consortium at the national level to take a look at what the
requirements and trainings were needed to be for an emergency
manager. And what you see over a period
of time is really your your Fire Chief, right, Who retires and
maybe becomes your emergency manager because he has
incredible kind of unseen experience and local knowledge
like nobody else. You start to see that, that that
Fire Chief, and I'm using him as an archetype, of course, but you
start to see that Fire Chief push pushed out really in favor
of people who have more education, people who are
overwhelmingly more female and people who you know, for whom.
And, and, and you know, I'm, I don't think it's a leap to say
that higher females with higher education levels are more likely
to take help take on your pet liberal causes.
So Emergency Management in this country has become has come
something that came from civil defense and firefighting and
this background and took people who had local knowledge and
incredible careers in those fields and turned them into kind
of an overarching taking a look at disaster preparedness in your
local jurisdiction. Through the this
professionalization of Emergency Management effort, which is
really taken on by FEMA, they have made more.
They have made sure to hire or to begin to hire people who can
be more easily influenced. And that might be hard on the
ears of some, but I'm talking about women with higher levels
of education, which are notoriously prone to to care for
their pet liberal causes. And now we see FEMA rolling out
their pet liberal causes of equity DI and things like
climate change and making sure you can access your abortion.
Yeah, and I just don't think we should look at, what is it, 96%
of preschool teachers are female.
I don't look at that at all, even though that's a very
influential role to play on the population of children and that
could influence them, that it is quite powerful if one
demographic is so disproportionate in one area.
I don't see anything wrong with that if these are people
voluntarily going into the field.
What would be terrible is if you said we're going to focus less
on meritocracy and make sure men are proportionately represented
as nurses and preschool teachers.
I think that would be an absolute sickening disaster.
It would be crazy. And I was reading a little bit
more about the the current FEMA director about her background.
Interestingly enough, she came out of Aurora, Co kind of some
interesting stuff has gone on in Aurora, Co the last, you know,
but now certainly, But you know, she she tells a story of walking
into a room to take a test, to become AI guess, to become a
firefighter with the city and being the only female there.
And those stories don't play to my ears like maybe they do with
some other people, you know, but but she said, I I almost walked
out. Well, I have been the woman in
the the, you know, kind of the only woman in the room before in
a public safety career. I was going to make a joke,
certainly as a libertarian, but that's a whole different story.
So and, and really adjust, you know, that those types of
statements that, that kind of that, that victim mentality,
that overstatement of what it is to you know, what, how important
your gender is versus how, how critical you are, how, how
important, how good you are in your role.
These are the things that, and, and this is not a a statement
about her professional career. She probably was an excellent
firefighter, whatever, right? She passed the test, but but
bringing that mentality to FEMA, letting that infiltrate down
into state and local organizations such that you make
sure you have people operating in a victim mentality
championing liberal causes is absolutely a recipe for
disaster. And you know, you know what I
can't do? I can't make a connection
between that and a piss poor FEMA response in Appalachia.
But but you know, it's, it's hard to know whether or not
there is there has been a long term impact of a focus on man
made disasters. So kind of spreading FEMA thin
in terms of how they're focused. And then really this, this goal
of professionalization and equity, whether or not it has
had an impact, I suspect one day we will know.
It's just a case of opportunity cost.
You only have so many dollars, monetary cost.
And then for every minute you spend focusing on what is the
race of the person, what was their income background, what is
their gender, what do they identify as, Let me make sure I
have all these pronouns in the right order.
That comes at the cost of actually focusing on the good or
service you claim to provide for the public.
So it just makes total sense that the more time and effort
you spend on this, it has to come at the expense of what
your. Alleged goal is supposed to be
when it comes to explicit examples of the government using
the term emergency in unjust ways.
During the Second World War, President Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066. This would have been in February
of 1942, so 2-3 months after Pearl Harbor, which led to the
internment. This was before FEMA, but he
basically gave the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, the right to
declare military zones and kidnap people by the 10s of
thousands. I think it was 122,000 Japanese,
German and Italian immigrants. We're just rounded up based on
an emergency. As far as what we've seen with
FEMA recently, have there any been, have there been any cases
of just explicit tyranny that we should watch out for?
You mean other than COVID other? Other think, well, I guess.
I mean, COVID, COVID is so I have, I have another, another
example that that's that we can talk about.
But COVID is a, a prime example of, of an opportunistic federal
government that has provided terrible incentives to state and
local governments to do their bidding, right?
As, as really just federal outposts and COVID was a test of
that. So in terms of, I mean, does it,
does it get worse than locking people in their homes, right?
Does it does it get worse than shuttering businesses?
Does it get worse than sending your, your Stormtroopers out
because a local business is open when it shouldn't be?
That, you know, I was in Delaware at the time and we had
Delaware State Police and other folks going and knocking on the
doors of businesses who weren't supposed to be open, right?
Or a restaurant who was caught with their, their chef wasn't
wearing a mask or they had patrons seated at a table not
properly wearing their masks. I mean, these are really a
government that can get their citizens to to tell on each
other in this fashion. Things are already so far gone
that, that maybe it cannot even be repaired.
But another good example. And, and I think that I, I
mostly saw this after COVID. So I think it is, I think it was
a response to how effective and how useful and lucrative COVID
was for States and local jurisdictions because the money
was just, you know, off the charts.
And they didn't use it all for COVID stuff either.
I'm sure that doesn't shock you, but there was and like Delaware
is a good example. I know this has gone on in other
states. There was an attempt to declare
a state of emergency around gun violence and this would this,
you know, doing that successfully.
Can you imagine, you know, Can you imagine what that proceeds,
right? What follows a state of
emergency declared on gun violence is not an attempt to
reduce crime in an inner city. No one cares about that, right?
Not, not an attempt at that at all, but really an attempt to,
to pinpoint and to focus on lawful gun owners.
People who, you know, are, are, are, you know, are armed and
people who have firearms in their homes.
This is not, you know, it's always cloaked under the
auspices of reducing violence in urban areas.
It never is actually that. And And so in the model of
COVID, we saw states like Delaware attempt to pass and I
don't think they did it successfully.
I'm no longer in Delaware, but attempt to pass.
And this is at a time when other legislation was active that was
infringing on 2nd Amendment rights as well.
So kind of doing, doing large scale battle in a state over
whether or not there is a violent, there is a state of
emergency around gun violence. And what would happen after that
is, you know, the emergency is kind of how the tap opens,
right? And so you end up with, with at
least millions of state dollars right, poured into, I would
assume public health organizations.
And what ends up happening is, you know, they make just like
COVID was a a public health emergency.
The gun violence would be seen as a public health emergency.
So now it's not just like law enforcement that is acting on
perceived gun related issues. It is also public health, right?
So an ear toward, you know, making sure your teachers are
listening for whether or not their students are talking about
whether or not mom and dad have a gun in their home.
Making sure, you know, people like the the counselors that are
accessed through public schools and paid with government funds
are extra attentive to their counseling sessions if there is
any discussion at all of firearms, making sure, yeah,
just just that there's education in the schools that is
antithetical to how you or I would see, you know, our Second
Amendment rights. So the you know what, what seems
innocuous and just a play at solving some inner city problems
around gun violence really is, is is so much worse than that.
And and, you know, in terms of definitions, yeah, I would agree
it is it is tyrannical and done in the model of COVID.
I think, I think with, I think the the blue states especially
learned that with COVID comes a model for forgetting whatever
you want in terms of policy and certainly in terms of money.
All right, So we could say FEMA's a disaster.
One thing you can do is fight to abolish FEMA, very costly.
So as far as alternatives, are there examples historically or
today that you have found of one, an emergency that existed
and two, people who organize voluntarily to achieve
successful relief efforts? What if if anything meets those
two criteria? There are there are a set of
researchers who come out of George Mason and they write for
the Mercatus Center there and this has been the sole focus of
much of their research. I've done some some projects
with them, some book chapters and stuff.
They are and of the preeminent experts on how community does
emergency response so much better than government can and
how often government is an impediment to community
response. And one of my favorite stories
that they tell is the story of the Vietnamese community in one
of the parishes in Louisiana that was hardest hit during
Hurricane Katrina. And there was a community
leader. He was well respected.
And he may have been a pastor. He may have been affiliated with
a church there. How he rallied the community to
make sure that they were, you know, if they were not
evacuated, that there was proper care for the elderly, proper
care for special needs individuals, that the story is,
you know, and I don't have all the, I don't have great details,
but that is one anecdote. This is one story in a in a host
of stories where what we what we learn is that the only people
who can appropriately respond to a disaster are people who are
local, are your neighbors and your communities.
Because the thing that government cannot have is local
knowledge. It's simply cannot even even
your local emergency manager, even that you're even a local
emergency manager in a small county.
We've already talked how that person is solely beholden to a
federal government and they're busy doing training and
paperwork and, and, and thinking about Al Qaeda, right?
So they're not thinking about, you know, there.
This is not to say there aren't some good ones.
I know, I know plenty of people who are, who are doing their
best. But this is, and this is a
generalization. But only your neighbors, only
your local community can understand what those needs are.
And the example of the Vietnamese community coming out
of Katrina was a prime, this one that always stuck with me that
the the folks from the Mercatus Center wrote about very fondly
because of their success. And that's one story out of
many. Well, maybe that's why Asians
have higher incomes than whites. I'm waiting for that, for that
pay gap to be closed. Any day now, I'm sure Kamala
Harris is going to write the executive order.
Miss Lepore, is there anything else that you would like to tell
me or the audience about that I will that I haven't covered yet?
No, I think, I think we've covered the bulk of it.
Keith, this was wonderful. You know, this is important to
talk about. I know.
You know, it's a little out of the headlines now.
I'm grateful that you still wanted to chat, but it's a
little out of the headlines and it will be out of recent memory.
The important thing is here, you know, there are opportunities to
push back. I think defend the Guard and
making sure we keep the National Guard at home for domestic
response is important. And I think the extent to which
we can, you know, the small L libertarians or Big L
libertarians can infiltrate their local governments, allow
the Mesas Caucus decentralized revolution strategy and start to
push back on our local governments heavy dependence on
federal grants. It is not healthy.
It's lucrative. Sure, it's great for bureaucracy
building, but it is not healthy and it certainly doesn't breed
autonomy. These are our two opportunities
that the other solutions are, are long slogs, right,
Overhauling FEMA, it's overhauling DHS, maybe, you
know, just dismembering. The two are are long slogs and
unlikely to happen. So I think States and local
jurisdictions kind of have to take matters into their own
hands. Thank you to everyone for
watching Keith and I Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian
Institute. Miss Lepore, thank you for your
time. Thank you so much, Keith.